Or perhaps he would handle this better if I were Virginia Woolf.
I grab his arm. “Promise me, before my mother or a hospital takes me away, promise me I will get to talk to Strots alone. Promise me.”
There’s a pause. Then Nick nods once. “You have my word. But you need to stay with me right now.”
Like I have a choice, I want to say as I close my eyes.
It seems odd to be in the position so many girls would envy, all Victorian-vapor’d on Hot RA’s couch, him crouched beside me on tenterhooks.
In a cruel twist of irony, my illness’s severity and implications deprive me of enjoying this fantasy made manifest. Then again, if I were fully present, I would likely implode.
Boiler room, indeed.
chapter FIFTEEN
Tera Taylor, undiscovered movie star, arrives just as everyone my age is leaving to go next door to have dinner at Wycliffe. She’s shown into Nick’s residential advisor apartment by an administrator I do not recognize, and I’m surprised by her lack of flourish and dramatic fanfare. The role of Fantastically Worried Mother has apparently been turned down even though it would arguably have played to her femme fatale strengths and also provided her with a conquest platform, given that both Nick and the administrator are men well over the age of consent in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Except then I remember her coming to the hospital after my second suicide attempt. She was curiously calm then, too.
She hasn’t dressed for attention, either. She is not in some figure-hugging wraparound, her cleavage not on display, her still shapely legs not set off by a flouncing hem, but rather one that is straight as a ruler and well below her knees. She hasn’t dressed at all, actually. She’s in her lunch lady school uniform, with its bright blue-and-white-checked gingham underlay and its white, Mother Goose apron. She hasn’t even removed her little plastic name tag that is pinned to her modest lapel, the one that reads Ms. Taylor. Her hairnet is off, however.
And that’s when I realize she was not home when she got the call. She was at work. How could I have forgotten? She didn’t lose her keys in the midst of her magazine collection or stop to do her hair or change into a dress. She came directly to me, her daughter, who’s in trouble once again—and not the kind of trouble that’s easily dealt with, like skipping class or refusing to turn in assignments or smoking in her dorm room. I bring the kind of trouble that halts the workday and makes you drive over the speed limit to your kid, heart in your throat.
I feel awful about everything.
“Hi, Mom,” I say as I sit forward on Nick’s couch.
“Hi,” she says without moving from the doorway. She’s too busy looking me over, no doubt searching for outward signs of catastrophe like bandaged wrists. Ligature marks. IV bags.
In the tense silence that follows—which I feel like lasts for days—I think of the importance I put upon relieving Strots of any misplaced sense of responsibility for my death. I think of the focus the goal gave me, the purpose that was strong enough to pave over the best-laid plans of a bipolar patient out alone in a big, bad world full of aspirin. Unfortunately, the Strots sidetrack, as dispositive as it was, is only short-term, and in the same vein, my mother’s normal way of operating—the dress, the cigarettes, the flirtation—has merely been temporarily wiped clean by yet another crisis of mine. As long as the outcome is good, she’ll return to her usual ways.
And as long as I’m not put on a psychiatric hold, so will I—and there are an infinite number of bottles of Bayer available for purchase and a boiler room in the basement of this dorm that’s going nowhere fast.
Assuming she doesn’t take me home right now.
I remember what Phil the Pharmacist said to me about how I must think about those I leave behind, and I am suddenly protective of all my mother’s affects and affectations that annoy me so much. I have a sense, with a sudden, shocking clarity, that if I take my own life, I will rob her of them. She will not recover to the odd place of functioning she has now. She’ll be ruined.
I know this to be true as I look into her eyes. She is terrified. And she, like Strots, will blame herself if I do anything rash and irreversible. It was her choice to send me here, her engineered result, and the fact that she has had to race out of the Lincoln Elementary School’s cafeteria, risking her job and no doubt her life, as she drove to get here, makes me feel ashamed. As Greta torments me, I torment my mother, although clearly there are limits to that comparison. Greta enjoys her outcomes. I am submerged and drowning in mine, all of which are involuntary.
My eyes tear up as Nick turns off the television that he and I have been watching to pass the time, and he and the administrator duck out of the apartment.
“Sarah,” my mother says, like she was waiting for them to go.
She never calls me Sarah.
She rushes over, dropping her handbag on the floor like she doesn’t care what’s in it or where it lands. At the couch, she drops her body beside mine in the same dismissive manner. She takes my hand and pulls it to her chest. As my sleeve rises up toward my elbow, I tug it back into place so that my scars at my wrist do not show. She doesn’t need a reminder of the times we have been here before. Neither do I.
“Are you okay?” she says with urgency.
Three words. Like I love you.
I want to tell her the truth. I want to tell her that I don’t think I’m handling this Ambrose thing too well. I want to tell her about Greta and the Brunettes, and Strots, who I’m now worried about as my mother worries about me. The problem with honesty that goes that deep, however, is that just as Phil the Pharmacist can call in reinforcements—and did—I cannot control the fallout of any such core-level revelations. I cannot trust my mother to stay in this connected, concerned space. I cannot make her see these events as I do, as things that are passing through my life, and my life alone. As much as my choices affect her, they aren’t emergencies to be solved by her and her army of adults. They aren’t blizzards that bring snow requiring her removal. They aren’t windstorms that knock down trees that she must chainsaw through to clear roads. They aren’t floods she must remediate from basements and low-lying areas.
They are my weather-related disasters, not hers, and I want to control how they are dealt with. Even though I am not handling any of this well. Even though I tried to buy the aspirin and the Orange Crush. Even though I am only a child still.
I close my eyes. Put like that, I should tell her everything. As unpleasant, invasive, and commandeering as adult solutions have proven to be, at least none of what the older generation has done to me involved my dying on the floor of the boiler room down in the Tellmer dorm’s basement.
“Do you want to come home?”
I’m so surprised she asks this that I turn my face to her. “What?”
“Do you want to just pack up your things and come home?”
I think of our house full of magazines. And of her exciting new boyfriend she told me about when we spoke on our regularly scheduled call this past Sunday. I imagine her smoking inside with the windows all closed up because the weather is turning cold and we have to save money by conserving heat. I hear her voice, calling out to me through the little rooms, pushing words about some article covering the love life of Kevin Costner. I picture whatever middle-aged man with an alcoholic’s florid complexion and blooming nose tissue that she’s pulled out of the plenty-of-fish sea sitting on the sofa, smoking with her in his undershirt.